Embodied Communication

Cognition arose in living organisms, in nature it is inseparable from a body, and only makes sense in a body. Likewise, natural communication and human language developed in intimate connection with body. When a person speaks, not only symbols are transmitted, but the whole body is in continuous motion. While speaking we can indicate the size and shape of an object by a few handstrokes, direct attention to a referenced object by pointing or gaze, and modify what we communicate by emotional facial expression. The meanings we transmit this way are multimodally encoded and strongly situated in the present context. Embodied communication is the term meant to refer to such, often spontaneous, behavioral phenomena. Over and above symbolic communication they may convey meanings in a form which is not part of a conventionalized code but nevertheless understandable. An iconic gesture, like the one illustrated in Fig. 1, can serve to represent and communicate a mental image in an embodied form (McNeill, 1992). Such a gestural sign obtains meaning by iconicity, i.e. a pictorial similarity between itself and its imagined referent. An emotional expression communicates an emotional state which in its subtlety can hardly be conveyed by symbols but enhances the representational power of symbolizations. Communication models that emphasize symbolic information transfer neglect the decisive role of non-symbolic qualities which are especially present in face-to-face communication. The cognitive modeling challenge is to devise theoretically grounded and empirically guided operational models that specify how mental processes and embodiment work together in communication.